Nicely said JCT:
I hope you were not talking about my statement above when you argue against the idea that "good specs equate to good sound." No one can seriously believe that and certainly not someone (like me) who listens to SETS at least part of the time.
I do believe, as I said above, that "If the measurements do not "add up" to good sound (and they do not) it means we, or at least someone, has to think about them more, not less." (this does not mean I think that all of life, let alone music or electronics, can be reduced to numbers so please no philosophical attacks)
So I agree with Unsound that walking away from engineering, a rather rigorous discipline (of which I am not a member) is walking away from what has made it possible for us to have audio and all of electronics for that matter. Ohm, Faraday, Maxwell, the folks who did the basic works in acoustics (J. Strutt , aka Lord Rayleigh), speakers (Theil/Small etc), Bell Labs and transistors. On and on
all measuremnt/number geeks.
I also agree with Brulee that you can be as into it as anybody without giving numbers/measurements a second thought. Get a good system and plug it in. I guess I disagree with him when he says that he doesnt understand why anybody is interested.
All the audio-design folk I respect combine real technical knowledge with good ears. It is never an either-or and always the combination of the two. To demand one or the other is in logic the fallacy of the false dichotomy.
You can buy a good system with your ears but you will never design one or even incompetently dabble in it, as I do, with your ears alone. The only way you can dismiss numbers/measurements is if you equate them with marketing specs. This is a very simple headed way to look at them.
A little technical knowledge is also the first defense to the endless marketing hype that infests audio. The hype (at least to my mind) is at least a great a danger as a blind adherence to numbers.
Fittingly, the whole thing reminds me a little of music. Most of the musicians I admire have a strong background in what is essentially a kind of number theory. A part of music can only be fully understood in that way. You can enjoy a fugue if you have never heard of an interval, but you are never going to write one or fully understand it. It is almost impossible to approach some forms of music without coming to terms with this.
( John Coltrane comes to mind) . Of course, music rises above this and yet, in a fundamental way, seems to depend upon it in some way. On the other hand, to equate music with numbers is surely to miss the point. (Least I come across as a musical snob some of my favorite musicians didnt know a hoot about it. Lightening Hopkins and John Hurt on guitar, for example. The strange thing is that these guys followed very distinct patterns in their playing (using 4ths and 5ths ) without ever understanding it at all. There was a recent article in Science magazine that says we are hard wired in this fashion. Who knows?
Cheers
I remain
